Please Tell Me Your Google Experiences For “Google 2017” Report

I believe that it’s obvious to pretty much everyone that we’ve now entered a new era of major Internet-related companies directly and indirectly impacting political processes and other aspects of our lives in ways that — frankly, to say the least — were not widely anticipated by most observers. So understanding where things stand these days with these firms is paramount, in terms of their own operations, and their impacts on their users and the world in general.

For many years the most common category of questions and comments that I receive relate one way or another to Google (while I have consulted to Google in the past, I am not currently doing so). So I’ve now begun work on what I’m tentatively calling “Google 2017” — a report (or “white paper” if you prefer) discussing the perceived overall state of Google (and its parent corporation Alphabet, Inc.) in relation to the sorts of issues that I noted above and other relevant related topics.

As part of this effort, I’d very much appreciate your emailing me your own noteworthy experiences with Google (and Alphabet). Good — bad — exemplary — abysmal — confused — resolved — pending — fantastic — or otherwise rising to the level that you feel could usefully contribute to a better understanding of Google and Alphabet overall.

Whether involving specific Google services (including everything from Search to Gmail to YouTube and beyond), accounts, privacy, security, interactions, legal or copyright issues — essentially anything positive, negative, or neutral that you are free to impart to me, that you believe might be of interest.

I would like to keep this report focused on relatively recent experiences and observations, so events that took place years ago that aren’t any longer particularly relevant are frankly of lesser use to me right now.

Your identity will be considered confidential, and any information that you send to me will also be considered confidential in the details — unless you specifically indicate otherwise. That is, I will use your information toward the effort’s reported aggregate analysis, and any of your specific examples or other data that you provide — that I might include in the report as illustrative examples — will be carefully anonymized, unless you give me permission to do otherwise. If you don’t want me to use your examples at all even anonymized, please let me know and that will be respected of course.

My general issue with google is the difficulty involved in finding original/source material related to newsworthy topics. For boring or unpopular research topics, I can use the typical search bar query and usually the top ten results are pretty close what I need. However, if looking for the original text of a quote, content of legislation, or academic study *that has been widely reported* the real meat of information is always drowned out by media reports which contain partial information but rank higher in the algorithm.